Five Digital Manufacturing Trends Reflected in 3D Printing and Machining

Although additive manufacturing is seen as the first inherently digital manufacturing technology, machining is becoming increasingly digital as well. Digitization is enabling a number of changes in manufacturing at large, including accelerated innovation, increased collaboration, personalization, sustainability and the ability to address supply chain disruptions. On this episode of AM Radio, I discuss how these topics apply to both AM and machining with Matt Danford of Additive Manufacturing Media’s sister media brand Modern Machine Shop. Listen to the episode above, or read on for the show notes and transcript.

Transcript

Julia Hider 

Whether you're adding material or taking it away, it's all manufacturing. We're going to look at manufacturing trends and see how they're relevant to both machining and additive manufacturing. That's coming up on AM Radio.

Peter Zelinski 

The AM Radio podcast is brought to you by the Additive Manufacturing Conference at IMTS. The leading industry event focused on 3D printing for production. Learn more at AdditiveConference.com.

Julia Hider 

Welcome to AM Radio. I'm Julia Hider. And today I have in the studio with me a special guest host, Matt Danford of Modern Machine Shop. Matt, can you briefly introduce yourself and what you do on Modern Machine Shop?

Matt Danford 

Sure. Hi, Julia. So yeah, I basically travel around the country and visit different manufacturing facilities and write about change in those facilities, mostly driven by technology, shops, installing new technology to evolve, also, increasingly, the business challenges they face. So our stories will often include a human aspect, but I write these narratives that you know, sort of make the manufacturer the hero of the story, as you've done, we miss you at Modern Machine Shop.

Julia Hider

I miss you guys, too.

Matt Danford

Yeah. Julia was one of our more prolific writers. And I'm sure now you're doing that the same thing for Additive [Manufacturing Media]. But yeah, it involves a lot of travel, a lot of learning about technology, and particularly how it's used. That's sort of what we're about is getting into our access to the end user facilities and hearing from them directly and learning their stories.

Julia Hider 

So one thing you do is you write a column for Modern Machine Shop. And can you tell us what the column is about?

Matt Danford 

Sure. Yeah. So I call it Data Matters. My name is Matt. But it is about data, machine learning, machine interconnectedness, networking, IoT, Industry 4.0, anything associated with those topics.

Julia Hider 

So yeah, obviously, there's a lot of crossover between that aspect of machining and 3D printing as well. And you wrote a column awhile back about 3D printing trends that are mirrored in machining. So I was thinking we could go through that and discuss these trends and see how they apply to both 3D printing and machining.

Matt Danford 

Sure, yeah, I think that column provides a pretty good frame for the conversation. That was based on HPs digital manufacturing trends report. It's a couple of years old now. But HP had basically outlined five different trends. They call it the digital manufacturing trends, but it's really all about additive manufacturing, obviously, additive is inherently digital. In my column, I just sort of took a look at each of those trends and thought, well, you know, this applies to my space as well, this is these are the same trends in many cases that I'm seeing in CNC machining businesses all around the country. And so I just sort of took each one in a bullet point and wrote a bit about how they apply to machining. So yeah, I think that's a great frame for the conversation.

Julia Hider 

All right, and we will make sure to link that column in the show notes. But let's get into it. So the first trend that we're going to discuss is accelerated innovation. And when it comes to 3D printing, the first thing that comes to my mind is prototyping. That's not a new thing in 3D printing, that was a major early application for 3D printing. And the technology has spread beyond that. But prototyping is still really useful, especially in certain applications. I had an article in Modern Machine Shop that was about a company called Accumold that specializes in micro-injection molds. And it's really challenging to make these molds and it's just as difficult to prototype the parts that come out of them, because they're using the same processes for a prototype mold and a mold that they're using in production. So they're actually micromachining, the prototype molds, but they acquired a micro 3D printer from Fabrica, that allows them to rapidly prototype micro parts before they invest time and resources into machining the micro mold.

Matt Danford 

Yeah, and that's a particularly cool example, I think, because it sort of demonstrates in my mind, how far additive has come. I mean, they get you like you just said you are matching the properties of the end result in production, right. And machining circles, you know, there's always a lot of question, is this going to be the same as the part that comes off my mill? You know, is it going to have the same properties? Is it going to perform the same way? And whatever the application is, and so I think, I think it's come a long way in that respect. So it shows that and it also shows that the original use case, you know, the application of early 3D printing is just as relevant today. And in fact, it's a lot more common among the shops that I visit. You know, when I first started at Modern Machine Shop, I remember reading and learning about stereolithography and being fascinated by that and there were a few, you know, early adopters, and now people have desktop office 3D printers doing the same thing, printing plastic parts, prototypes of what they're going to machine. And in some cases, these are just, you know, look and feel. In some cases, they're actually functional, test, fit and function. And of course, we're moving well beyond that or Additive Manufacturing Media wouldn't exist, right?

Julia Hider

Exactly.

Matt Danford

Yeah. In fact, not only has prototyping not been, you know, supplanted by all these other uses of additive manufacturing we're seeing but you know, it's really accelerated. I mean, a lot of the shops I'm visiting, you know, they have these 3D printers in their offices, like I mentioned, and they're having their engineering meetings, they pass around these, these part prototype things. And they can really learn something even from something that is just a plastic dummy piece, for example, and not a real world representative. So I remember one particular shop that does this advanced precision engineering, one of the more sophisticated shops I've been in, in the past few years. And their CEO, he had this quote about a Christmas tree where, you know, you go into the forest, and you cut down a Christmas tree, you know, old school way of getting a Christmas tree and you think it's gonna fit in your living room, it'll never fit in your living room. Well, you know, maybe your 3D printed part, sometimes that kind of thing comes out. And you know, that's something simple that maybe you wouldn't think of, you know, or you find yourself going, hey, that's a really tight corner for that end mill. Maybe we can open that up. Who knows?

Julia Hider 

Yeah, and I was talking to Savage Automation, who I think I'll talk about a little bit more in detail later in this conversation, but they 3D print end-of-arm tooling, but they prototype on a different 3D printer, just to make sure that you know, what they're printing is going to be printable for this other process. So

Matt Danford 

So what's the difference between the two 3D printers? What do you need to make a functional part versus a prototype? And so in that specific case,

Julia Hider 

Okay, so basically, they're doing end-of-arm tooling, and it's pneumatically actuated. So it needs to be airtight. And they'll prototype it on a FDM 3D printer. It's like the extrusion, extruded plastic. And so that's not going to be as airtight as Multi Jet Fusion, which is like a powder bed plastic process. So when they're, you know, looking at the FDM version, they can get feedback on how printable it is

Matt Danford 

Interesting. Okay. So you need that data feedback? Maybe I should write something about that.

Julia Hider 

Alright, so the next trend is collaboration. And this is fresh in my mind, because it's one of the trends that we discussed in our Rapid recap. So the example of this that I mentioned in that episode was about how Stratasys released third party materials, which is a departure from their strategy in the past, which was a closed materials ecosystem.

Matt Danford 

Yeah, that story kind of surprises me just because I'm sort of used to it, not, not to disparage the industry or anything, but it historically it has been a little a little closed off.

Julia Hider 

And the way the additive manufacturing industry deals with materials in general is like such a contrast to machining, you know, AM is a little bit different in that you're a lot of times creating the material or more fundamentally, changing it as you print a part versus machining it. Can you imagine if a machine tool builder said you could only use the materials that the OEM is selling, you know, that would be…

Matt Danford 

That's crazy, I couldn't imagine that. You know, that said that general trend, I mean, hearing that, that that Stratasys is opened, that sort of surprises me just based on, you know, my experience so far, in a good way, in a good way, good things happen. I think when these technology suppliers are more open, and we can maybe depart from additive for a minute here, but I just wrote about one example. So there is a machine monitoring software developer, they make a cloud-based analytics platform called Machine Metrics. And so the idea is you install their edge device and use their cloud software to monitor your production processes and spot trends. Well, a lot of the data they you know, the way you link in to CNC machine tool is through the CNC, the computer numeric control, and depending on what you want to do, if you want to go beyond just tracking is my machine on or off, or is it running, you'll have people adding, you know, external sensors to things. And the idea of what Machine Metrics is trying to do is get really high fidelity CNC data from the CNCs, high frequency data from the CNC, so they're collecting a lot more data points than a standard connection will enable and in doing that, they can get information that you otherwise wouldn't be able to get without an external sensor, which of course, can get bumped, installed wrong, be affected by conditions in the environment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, the only reason they're able to do this, and by the way it took them a few years, is because the supplier FANUC of the CNCS has an open interface so that that sort of facilitates this development work that enabled them to do that and absent that interface. So, so far, this is this is only available for FANUC CNCs and you know, they're working with other builders and, and manufacturers, etc., but it's just one example of why it can be good for everyone when companies open up more, I mean, you can take other approaches, too. There's a need for this, otherwise you wouldn't see all these big companies gobbling up little ones, but the end result is the same. We need these technologies to integrate together in order to be effective today, everybody talks about the quote unquote smart factory, I'm going to the Hexagon conference in Las Vegas in a few weeks. And Hexagon is a company with tendrils and everything with smart minds, smart cities, I'm going to be focused on their coordinate measuring machines, CAM software, and that sort of thing. But they're all about using quality data to drive production, as opposed to treating quality as an afterthought. So the measurement feeds back into the production stage, and you have automatic adjustments and feedback loops. And in order to do that, you, you have to have everything work together, which is why Hexagon is an example of a company that has gone on a slew of acquisitions in recent years to acquire all the necessary capabilities. So however you accomplish it, you need that and it's not just about technology, it's also about people. One thing I probably should pick up because it's been a few months since we've written about it, defense industry contractors are really concerned right now with the cybersecurity model certification, which is a new requirement from the Defense Department. Whereas before, you could basically just check the box and say, yep, I meet the NIST standard, I'm, I'm certified for cybersecurity. Now, the government is going to be sending third party auditors to all the critical nodes in the supply chain, which includes a lot of small businesses, and they need to work together, they're reaching out to software experts and consultants and other outside companies that maybe machine shops wouldn't have worked with in the past.

Julia Hider 

Yeah, lots of crossover, again, with 3D printing, with a lot of that stuff as well, on the software and the security side. Yeah, like, I know, this openness is sort of a contentious topic in additive manufacturing and people have really strong opinions about it. But it'll be interesting to see how that changes as it goes forward. And then another sort of sub-topic under collaboration is education. And that's where I think that both additive manufacturing and machining are facing some challenges, but they're facing different challenges. You know, on the AM side, the technology is still pretty new and the industry is working on figuring out what education is needed and what it should look like and how to establish these programs. I think people want and need more educational opportunities for both people who are just getting started and more established manufacturers in continuing education, machining is more established, so the education situation is a little bit different, but there are still some challenges. You want to talk about that?

Matt Danford 

Sure. I mean, I guess, right off the bat, what you're describing, and I hadn't really thought about that before, like, you know, what kind of education would it take to run an additive manufacturing machine outside the context of the shops that I'm watching struggle to run their, their additive manufacturing machine. So I guess object as a strong way of putting it, I wouldn't necessarily object but the idea of it being established, I mean, maybe it was at some point. But I think right now, what's encouraging our efforts to reestablish it in machining, I think the education portion is something that was sort of lost. And what's encouraging, and I think, you know, I'd wrap additive into this and all of manufacturing is, you know, it seems like people are paying attention now, right? They've gotten the message, that a message that I did not get, a lot of others didn't get either, it's funny, you visit these machine shops, and there are, let's just say there are a lot of people younger than me, and a lot of people older than me, I went to high school in the 90s. And at that time, the bad kids went into shop class and tech school, the quote unquote, bad kids. And if you wanted to make anything of yourself, you were going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or you're gonna get you were gonna go get a four-year degree. And so that's what I did. And I didn't even learn what a machine tool was, until years after that, and I can still recall when I did learn, when I started here, you know, looking around at everything, you know, in my office, at my house and wondering, you know, how was that made? And it's just something people have never thought about, and I think that's changing. And, and that's good. And you also mentioned, you know, where you led off, of course, is the, the learning curve with additive itself. And that's, that's also something I'm witnessing. So I mentioned a shop earlier, Advanced Precision Engineering, and they were printing robot grippers. And as part of my story, I detailed one of the challenges of what they had to learn, this is a company who specializes in machining, so now they have to just tune the basic settings, you know, how do you orient the part on the bed? What's the printing density? They were using this Kevlar reinforcement material and specified sections of the gripper. And so they face this challenge with these thin structures and the fibers are, were a certain width, and so I'm probably butchering this and it's been a couple of years, but they had to fine tune how they spaced the layers and adjust various parameters and it's complicated stuff and so that's something that, you know, machine shops particularly if you want to get past that, just the basic dummy plastic part of what you're machining, they may have to deal with.

Julia Hider 

You mentioned, you know, 3D printing and robots. I feel like those are two of the gateway drugs into manufacturing now.

Matt Danford 

That's a great way to, that's a great way to put it and I think actually that leads us directly to the next topic or theme we were going to talk about.

Julia Hider 

And we will get to that after a quick break.

Peter Zelinski 

The AM Radio podcast is brought to you by the Additive Manufacturing Conference at IMTS, the leading industry event focused on 3D printing for production. Co-located with North America's largest trade show dedicated to manufacturing equipment, the AMC takes place September 14 and 15th at Chicago's McCormick Place. The Conference takes a practical applications-based look at the machines, materials and methodologies being used to 3D print functional components, including both tooling and end-use production parts. The event is designed for owners, executives and engineers, as well as OEMs involved in durable goods manufacturing, join the Additive Manufacturing team in Chicago for a day and a half of conference sessions and networking opportunities. Find more information and register at AdditiveConference.com.

Julia Hider 

All right. Welcome back. I'm here with Matt Danford of Modern Machine Shop. And we're talking about trends in manufacturing, how they apply to both additive manufacturing and machining. And before the break, we were talking about robots and 3D printing and that leads into our next topic of personalization and mass customization. And my example of this is something I mentioned earlier in the show, Savage Automation. They make custom 3D printed end of arm tooling for automating injection molding. And custom end of arm tooling isn't really a common thing in injection molding, that's something that I learned, they're just using these kits where they have to, you know, put the suction cups in the air lines themselves and adjust them so they move around and they get loose. So 3D printing is providing a method of mass customization for this niche application, so you don't need tooling. But even with tooling like you need in machining there are more ways of advancing, you know, high mix, low volume work. So I do want to talk about that.

Matt Danford 

Sure. Absolutely. That sounds like an interesting mold story, mold tooling story. I have to go read that. But yeah.

Julia Hider

We’ll link it in the show notes.

Matt Danford

With, with with machining, it's really you know, so like you said additive is all about eliminating tooling. Well, really with machining, I kind of think of it's more about making tooling as opposed to eliminating it in a lot of situations. Yeah, yeah. So particularly, we mentioned robots a few times, particularly the new collaborative robots. You know, what did you call that a gateway drug? Well, yeah, they're a gateway drug to automation, because they're, they're easy to program and you just show it, show it where to go, you don't need a cage, they're generally less expensive. And you know, as long as your, your part isn't too large, or too heavy, and you don't need to move the robot too fast, this just dramatically increases, where you can apply automation. But really, the robot is only part of the story, right? So bring it back to the tooling and we're talking about expanding possibilities for automation, particularly in job shop type environments, where you're not making the same thing over and over again, you have to change that robot gripper to accommodate a new part. While traditionally you would do that by traditional means of manufacturing, whether that means you know, machining, a gripper or whatever, with a 3D printer, you just print it, granted, you know, somebody has to design that, it's going to require some material to print from. But I think the overall cost benefit is really a no brainer, when the other scenario is you spend time not only in your CAD software, but also on the shop floor, you're using expensive material, you're wearing out your cutting tools all before the robot can even do its thing. And you know, obviously when your, your time setting up starts to exceed the time making parts, it's just it's no longer practical. And that's just the one application. You know, robot grippers is a particularly good one, but I see just fixtures in general, the possibilities are huge, because again, whether you're holding it with a robot and anything else, fixture is generally part specific, you've got to grip it and you know, there are some limitations. So I don't really see them, you know, additively manufactured fixtures holding parts on machine tables. You need a lot of rigidity for that. I don't know is that something that's possible?

Julia Hider 

I think there's some advancement, especially with you know, carbon fiber materials continuous or chopped, I think that that is allowing that to advance.

Matt Danford 

Well, that would be unbelievable. One of the things, I'm really looking to write a good work holding article, if there are any machinists out there listening to this, who have a good work holding story to tell, I'm interested, but generally, you probably don't want to tell it because that's their secret sauce, right? That's where they really differentiate themselves in a lot of cases is how you hold that part. It all starts with that. And if you could 3D print a fixture to hold it for, you know, milling or turning, that would be that would be pretty but even if you can’t that possibility aside, you know, again, you have your robot grippers one place I see it a lot is in CMM fixturing, coordinate measuring machines, and inspecting the parts. You don't need that sturdy bite necessarily. And so it's particularly good for holding really delicate parts for inspection. Another example I guess, of tool making, you know, this, all of this kind of, this part of the conversation started with the injection mold making application. One of my first exposures to additive manufacturing beyond the prototyping realm was when I worked, I did a brief stint at our sister publication, Mold Making Technology, which so there I had the opportunity to be incredibly confused by not only the intricacies of CNC machining, but also things like hot runners and plastic delivery systems and all this other stuff that goes into, into making a mold, which is like a little machine, right? Well, what a lot of these mold makers started doing, and you know, maybe this is old news for them, I was writing about this a lot in 2014, 2015, but you know, printing conformal cooling channels, printing mold inserts for the corners and cavities, where instead of drilling a straight line cooling hole, you could have that cooling channel sort of closely follow the contours of the mold and the resulting part to achieve more efficient cooling. And so you know, there's another example of, you know, additive, not eliminating the tooling that, that being used to make it in a different way. So maybe that's a different form of customization than what we started talking about, you know, customizing the geometry of the cooling channel to the geometry of the mold, but…

Julia Hider 

Bringing it back to the injection molding automation example that I had in the beginning.

Matt Danford 

Good job. Exactly.

Julia Hider 

So let's move on to our next topic, which is sustainability. And this is another big area of opportunity for additive manufacturing. You know, on the plastic side, there are companies like Robos, doing and IC3D doing material take-back programs to turn leftover material and parts at the end of their lifecycle into new filament. And on the metal side, you have companies like 6K, that are turning scrap or metal chips from machining into powder for 3D printing.

Matt Danford 

Wow, that's, that's pretty cool. How does that work?

Julia Hider 

So I'm not the expert on this, we'll link an article with more details. But 6K started as a recycling company. So you know, they know how to clean the material from many of the, like, coolant or oils that come in with the material and they mill it down to the right size. And then they run it through a reactor that spiritizes it and you know, turns it into these, you know, metal powder particles that are the right size.

Matt Danford 

Oh, please tell me more offline about that. That sounds like, yeah, huge, just on the face of it. Yeah, I wonder about things like, you know, getting the chips out of the coolant, or I guess the other way around getting the coolant on the chips. And then, you know, other processing requirements. But yeah.

Julia Hider 

You know, we've both been in manufacturing, you know, metal cutting facilities and seeing huge bins of chips.

Matt Danford 

Like we have them on our shoes.

Julia Hider 

And the coolant, the coolant clings to my hair. But, yeah, another opportunity for sustainability and manufacturing that I think applies to both machining and 3D printing is the blockchain. Stephanie has written a couple of articles about this. One example is called VeriTX, which is a platform for sourcing 3D printed aerospace and defense parts that uses blockchain to protect the part files, you know, you were talking about cybersecurity earlier. And Stephanie also wrote about CoreLedger, which makes a solution for distributing additive manufacturing files that accounts for security and authenticity. And it restricts the number of parts that a user can print. So I know you've written about this before. Can you talk about some examples?

Matt Danford 

It's been a while. I think I'm twitching a little bit. It's been a while since I've written about blockchain, I'm not. There is one organization, I'm aware of that, that that's pushing it heavily and it's actually doing it. It's called SyncFab. And like I said, it's been a few years, since I've covered it, but I know that they're they're still out there. And at the time that I was writing about it, they were, they had just released their MFG coin, which is a digital currency like Bitcoin and it does function like money, but the real analogy was more like a fuel for the transactions that occur on their, on their network, and I can already feel us losing the audience, because blockchain is so complicated, which is why, but it's really fascinating and just overall to bring it out of that specific example and maybe talk about it more broadly, I think there's probably great promise for blockchain, you know, with distributed manufacturing and additive, it's a little more obvious in terms of you need security because, you know, the way it works, it's you know, you send a digital file for printing at disparate locations by these printers who as we've, which as we've established, don't need any tooling. But you know, you could apply the same model to anything really, it's just a little more complicated. I think of everything flying around in all the files flying around in a typical, you know, machining application. You've got to get your design document, your material certifications, your gauge calibration records and more. And, you know, just maybe you need tooling, maybe it's more complicated, but you can still adopt a distributed model in today's world. And all of those things need to be seen just as secure as any 3D print file, right? Getting back to distributed manufacturing, but maybe off of blockchain a little bit, you know, this sort of, this sort of front-end automation, and you know, SyncFab has it too, but so do other, you know, sort of supplier networks, if you will, that don't use the blockchain, I can think of three or four examples off the top of my head where, you know, you sign up and you join, and a lot of the way that these networks work, and one thing they have in common is this front-end automation that's designed around the customer experience, where all they have to do is upload a CAD file, and it instantly spits back, you know, design for manufacturing information, costs, materials, best processes and machines, and it'll identify, you know, which shop to do it. And, of course, you know, you open this with a comment on sustainability, you know, the whole idea is, however you do it, whether it's through blockchain, or an internet network, or whatever, you can make manufacturing more local, these local machine shops and manufacturing businesses can make themselves visible in this way. And one trend I've seen in that that I think is pretty interesting, this kind of front-end automation I'm talking about is starting to become available without the network attached. So some, some of these companies are offering white labeling stuff. So shops can do it themselves, and, you know, provide that kind of front end to customers on their own and market themselves in that way. And, you know, maybe there doesn't need to be a formal distribution network to sort of achieve the same kinds of things and enable suppliers and parts procurement people to contract more locally and efficiently.

Julia Hider 

And I think this whole idea of you know, distributed localized manufacturing leads pretty well into our last topic, which is economic development, or economic advancement. And one of the first and first things that comes to my mind is AM's ability to address supply chain disruptions. And there are lots of examples of this particularly related to the pandemic. I was at a Formlabs event a few weeks ago, and the CEO was talking about how, you know, at one point in the pandemic, there was a shortage of nasal pharyngeal swabs that were needed for, you know, taking samples for COVID tests. And the company worked with the healthcare industry to get you know, materials and develop prototypes and perform testing on 3D printed swabs. And now those 3D printed swabs are Class I approved medical devices that are, were used to help address this supply chain shortage that we face in the pandemic.

Matt Danford 

Yeah, and I, we see the same things. I mean, you saw the same things. Remember the sprint in 2020? So as we established earlier, Julia used to write for Modern [Machine Shop], until very recently, and in 2020 amid the lockdown we did what we called the sprint where we switched from feature writers to newspaper reporters, and tried to do as many sort of rapid fire stories as we could to populate one of our print issues with stories of these manufacturers rising to the challenge and printing parts. At the time, it was mostly about ventilators, there was a ventilator shortage. And, of course, we're Modern Machine Shop, not Additive Manufacturing, right, so all of these stories involve machining. And that brings me to the main point here, it's not really about the additive in additive, it's less about the additive nature of additive, than the digital nature of additive that really facilitates a lot of the most important applications, particularly the ones we're talking about here. So the, the one that I the story that I wrote, for example, is about a company called Protolabs and it's kind of like they use a system that’s sort of like the front end automation I was talking about earlier, you know, they have CNC machining, they have injection molding, and they have 3D printing. But, you know, the process begins the same way. It's the submission of this digital design file and they have software that analyzes it and assesses its manufacturability and spits a quote back and then from there, it feeds into, you know, a digital workflow through their facility, and this is what's driving it. Sure, there are obviously benefits to 3D printing parts over machining them or in some cases, you've got to go to the machining, but really, it’s this digital stuff. I think that that’s the real enabler of you know, the, the trends that the HP report cited, you know, for sustainability and economic advancement, and it is after all, why HP calls their report, I would guess, the digital trends report as opposed to the additive manufacturing trends even though it's really all about additive or focused on additive.

Julia Hider 

Yeah, I think that's a good place to wrap up this conversation, is you know, additive is a digital technology and machining is becoming more digital and you know, just finding that area of intersection.

Matt Danford 

Sure, lots of, lots of parallels and points of intersections.

Julia Hider 

Thanks, Matt. I think this was a really good, interesting conversation. To all of our listeners, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and give it a five star rating. And if you want to learn more about any of the things that we mentioned on this episode, make sure to check out the show notes. Thanks for listening.

AM Radio is recorded with help from Austin Grogan and Seth Cooper. The show is edited by Alex Lytle and Stephanie Hendrixson. Our artwork is by Kate Bilberry. AM Radio and Additive Manufacturing Media are products of Gardner Business Media located in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm Julia Hider. Thanks for listening.